‘The Night Piece: To Julia’: A Poem by Robert Herrick
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Glow-worms, shooting stars, and elves: all can be found in ‘The Night Piece: To Julia’, a charming poem by the seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick (and that’s just the first three lines). The last line invites a sexual reading, a sign of the thinly-veiled eroticism that pervades Herrick’s Julia poems. (Though here we might add foot-fetishism as well.)
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‘My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border, O, / And carefully he bred me in decency and order, O’: so begins this poem, ‘My Father Was a Farmer’, written to the tune of ‘The Weaver and His Shuttle, O’, in which Robert Burns (1759-96) reflects on the fact that he, like his father, was bred for labour and toil.
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Try as I might I cannot find a sung version of ‘My Father Was a Farmer’ nor of ‘The Weaver and His Shuttle, O’ unless I am wiling to purchase a CD containing the former.
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Anne Bradstreet (1612-72) was the first poet, male or female, from America to have a book of poems published. As well as penning a touching poem about her husband, Bradstreet also wrote this poem, ‘To Her Father with Some Verses’, in honour of her father.
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Probably Robert Browning’s most famous (and widely studied) dramatic monologue, ‘My Last Duchess’ is spoken by the Duke of Ferrara, chatting away to an acquaintance (for whom we, the reader, are the stand-in) and revealing a sinister back-story lurking behind the portrait of his late wife, the Duchess, that adorns the wall.
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One of the most interesting female poets of the seventeenth century, Katherine Philips (1632-64) wrote this short poem as an elegy for her son, ‘H. P.’, who died just six weeks after he was born. The joyous exultation with which the birth had been greeted – ‘A son, a son is born at last’ – turns to tragedy with the boy’s death, in this heart-wrenching and accessible elegy by an underrated seventeenth-century female poet.
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This poem by the Irish poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74) is about a rabid dog that bites a man, and the effect that this act of violence has on the people of London.
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‘The Lambs of Grasmere’, its title referring to the Lake District, that area of England forever associated with Wordsworth and Romantic poetry, focuses on what Christina Rossetti (1830-94) calls the ‘pastureless wet pasture ground’ and the lambs which are saved from starvation by the shepherds, who come each day with bottles of milk to feed them.
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‘Sonnet on Being Cautioned against Walking on a Headland’ is that rarest of things: a Gothic sonnet. This needn’t surprise when we bear in mind that the sonnet’s author, Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806), was associated with English Romanticism and was also a key figure in the revival of the English sonnet.
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‘To A Lady With An Unruly And Ill-Mannered Dog Who Bit Several Persons Of Importance’ is a long title for what is not that long a poem. Its author was Sir Walter Raleigh – not the Elizabethan and Jacobean explorer and poet (who didn’t introduce tobacco and potatoes to Europe), but the Professor of English Literature named Sir Walter Raleigh (1861-1922). Raleigh was, notably, the first person to hold a Chair in English Literature at the University of Oxford. Raleigh was also a successful poet, as ‘To A Lady With An Unruly And Ill-Mannered Dog Who Bit Several Persons Of Importance’ demonstrates.
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Philip Larkin once recalled hearing William Wordsworth’s poem ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ recited on BBC radio, and having to pull over to the side of the road, as his eyes had filled with tears. ‘Intimations of Immortality’ remains a powerful meditation on death, the loss of childhood innocence, and the way we tend to get further away from ourselves – our true roots and our beliefs – as we grow older.
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I love this poem. I simply had to go and find a recitation of it to share with you.
These are the ones I consider "least bad" rather than the good.
Enjoy
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